


When All Other Lights Go Out

by thearrogantemu



Series: The Splintered Light [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Ascetics, Contemplation, Finally a fic without a Very Long Conversation, First Age, Gen, Obscure Noldor Women, Practical Theodicy Exercises with the House of Finwe, Stars, aman - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 01:42:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7825297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thearrogantemu/pseuds/thearrogantemu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Well, that was easy, </i>she thought, <i> I have found enlightenment, now what?</i></p>
<p>She tried to laugh again, but her throat was stiff with the cold.</p>
<p><i>I could die here, </i> she thought, and then<i> Could I?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	When All Other Lights Go Out

**Author's Note:**

> I first encountered the characterization of Findis as a hermit in the words of [Himring](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6435076) and though my take is somewhat different, I must acknowledge my debt to that lovely story.
> 
> Thanks, as ever, to my beta Sumeria, whose [drawing of Findis](http://sumeria.deviantart.com/art/Findis-605446512) meant that I started thinking about her, which meant before long that I had to write this.

_ Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’ _

_ -The Sayings of the Desert Fathers _

* * *

As the rays of the sun spilled down over the peaks of the Mountains of Defense, Findis rose from where she had been sitting straight-backed among the stones, walked to a promontory, and began to dance, slow and studied and graceful. The dance, nearly as old as the sun itself, had been her wordless song of praise for centuries.

Indis, who had sat beside her eldest daughter through the night, watched her in silence. The motions were nothing like the holy dances in the monasteries of Valmar and yet their meaning was clear, as familiar as her child’s face or the sound of her voice.

When the sun was fully in the sky, Findis came to rest, kneeling on the rock. The light shone on her upturned palms. The silence of the mountains was vast and bright. The rising wind stirred faint sound from the wind-harp that hung from the corner of her daughter’s home, and from some forest far below came the faint clear call of a bird.

Findis straightened, looked for a moment at her mother, and then, without haste, began the tasks of the day. They were few; drawing water and grinding meal, tending to the sparse garden that grew in the shelter of the outcropping, sweeping the house, and setting out seeds for the birds and the rock-rabbits that frequented the heights where she had made her home.

The dowager queen of the Noldor sat on the promontory with her legs folded under her, looking out over the Blessed Realm below. Something glittered on the plain beyond the forests, small and distant as a grain of sand catching the light: the golden streets and the silver towers of Valmar.

“You cannot see the sea,” Indis said softly. Her daughter came up beside her, and looked down with her at the world she had left behind before the sun had first risen. “I suppose that is well. I do not think I could bear to look upon it. Or that, having seen it, I could bear to look away.”

Her daughter still said nothing, but her presence was bright and constant as the sun whose heat was beginning to warm the stone beneath them.

“When you left us, I grieved.” Indis did not take her eyes from the lands far below. “I grieved because my child was leaving me. And now – you are the only one left.”

Indis knew there were no marks of sorrow in her face. She was as strong and golden as the day that Finwë had seen her descending from the slopes of Taniquetil, with the light of Laurelin in her eyes and her hair. It was in her voice that long grief had left its traces, and she knew her daughter could hear them.

“Arafinwë is gone,” she said at last. “He has sailed across the Great Sea, and with him the better part of the Noldor, and those of the People of the Light who have taken up weapons for war. The Holy Ones themselves have stretched forth their power. But you must have seen all that...”

Findis had seen it; she had felt it in the air and in the earth, in the thunder of wings descending from the unmeasured heights of Taniquetil. The earth had trembled beneath marching feet, spears had glittered silver on the golden streets of Valmar, and the wind itself had seemed a war cry, passing into the east and vanishing over the sea. 

Indis twisted her hands together in her lap. Long ago she had left the peaceful Vanyar for the disputatious Noldor, but her return in sorrow to the lands of her birth had not entirely quieted her heart.  She looked at her silent daughter. “Do you speak at all, anymore?”

At that Findis smiled, a cloud’s shadow slipping away from a stone. “When there is something that I need to say.”

Indis laughed to herself, breathless and bitter. The courtiers of the Noldor, her lost children, would have found things to say. There would be brilliantly expressed reassurance, beautifully rendered sorrow, and plans, plans, atomizing the end of the world into its component pieces, or drawing it together into the clean and coherent lines of history. But her daughter waited wordless and silent beside her, and at once Indis pressed her hands to her mouth and began to weep. The wind and the sun and the thin mountain air dried her tears as they fell.

She had made the journey to her daughter’s remote and solitary dwelling only once before, and that had also been in the grip of sorrow. Her husband was dead and her children were gone and the people she had chosen had placed themselves under the wrath of the gods. While the Teleri mourned on the shore, while Ingwe’s people sang in the darkened streets, Indis had walked into the mountains. Her feet which had been so strong and swift had stumbled among the rocks, and the cold wind from the heights had hissed in her ears, and there was nothing, nothing that could be said.

She had met Findis at last in her hermitage high among the rocks: the daughter who had left her people for a life of solitary contemplation. She had stayed with her for years, while the gods took their unfathomable counsel and her furious children took the frozen road across the impassable North and her youngest son returned in shame to his wife’s kindred by the sea. Together they had worked and waited and watched, and together they had seen the rising of the new-formed moon.

***

Findis had been born a year to the day after her parents had been wed, and her begetting was celebrated in the same breath with their union.  _ “Our King has now his heart’s desire,” _ the poets sang.  _ “And thus it has come to pass even as the One spoke to the Lords of Song, that out of sorrow joy shall be born.” _

Finwë’s joy was the joy of the Noldor, or so the songs would have it. Their King, who had been alone in all the Blessed Realm in his sorrow, was now restored to life and fruitfulness. The coming of golden Indis into the darkened Court was as the flowering of Laurelin after Telperion faded, and the birth of a child to crown their union was proof in living truth that tears might be turned to laughter and what was marred be mended. Her father had named her Findis, but her mother had named her Noldomire, which was  _ Jewel of the Noldor. _

It was not until much later that young Findis, growing up the cherished daughter of the King and Queen, learned the name of the sorrow that the songs spoke of, the sorrow to which she was hailed as the remedy.

There was much that she did not understand about her older brother: Fëanor with his flashing temper and his brilliant eyes, among the foremost scholars of the Noldor though still in his childhood. His voice and the shape of his words sounded different from those of others. He spoke of Indis as  _ your mother _ . His eyes went hard and his lips set when he heard the songs sung in Finwë’s honor:  _ Our King has now his heart’s desire.  _

Her brother was not hostile to her, not at first. He alternated between disregard and sudden intense interest. At one point while she was still very young indeed – walking but not yet speaking – he had found her in an unguarded moment and made off with her, taking her up to a workroom in one of the towers.

The servants of the palace had found them, hours later, Fëanor plying the young Findis with sweets and making careful notes on the nonsense that she babbled. Their guardians had been frantic, but Fëanor was unperturbed.

“I mean to make trial of the idea,” he said, “that language has its roots in the mind. I have here –” he waved at the desk where he had stacked a number of very old and exceedingly precious volumes that should have been in the royal library, “the sum of our work on the origins of our language; but it’s guesswork, guesswork, because even the memories of the oldest fail when it comes to the roots of our language. Think about it. Even you yourself, Unbegotten, can’t remember a time before you learned to speak, can you? But look at her.” He pointed to Findis, who was trying, without success, to grab for one of the books. “She is trying to speak, but she doesn’t have language yet. How if the sounds she makes reflect the sounds that we believe to be –”

“You cannot do experiments on your sister!” The servants were more concerned with the well-being of their charges than with linguistic investigations, and the experiment came to an abrupt end. Fëanor followed her around making notes for a few more days, but soon he lost interest in that line of investigation, and with it, for a time, in his sister.

Findis, however, did not lose interest in him. As she grew, she would sit for hours, perched on a stool in the workshops, watching him at work. At first he had tried to teach her what he was doing, explaining his thoughts with a combination of enthusiasm and gentleness that would have astonished the scholars of the Noldor – whose interactions with him grew more acrimonious as he tore through entire academic departments and upended cherished theories. But when he discovered that she was no scholar herself, and had no inclination for works of craft, her presence faded from his thought even though she stood before him.

“What are you looking for?” she asked him one day. She was perched on a stool in the jewelsmiths’ workshop. Silver and white, the full blossoming of Telperion, washed over the outside of the walls. The windows, though, were covered with heavy cloth and the workshop was as dim as the inside of closed eyes. Her brother, now grown long-limbed and tall, more a youth than a boy, was bent over a metal tube, peering through a small opening in the top.

“Light.” He did not raise his head. Asking Fëanor a question when he was absorbed in his work was an unpredictable thing – he might ignore the questioner altogether, launch into an hours-long explanation, or hurl something in the approximate direction of the source of the interruption. Findis slipped down off the stool and padded barefoot across the workshop floor.

“Then why have you covered the windows?”

Now Fëanor did straighten, and with a quick motion drew out the stone he had been at work on. It was a pale, nearly transparent jewel, simply cut.

“I seek the light behind the light.” He held it out so she could see it, and even in the darkness of the workshop there was a glitter in its depths that was more than reflection. Findis gasped for the wonder of it, and Fëanor smiled, sudden and brilliant.

“There is light like this in all things, child of Indis, if I can only call it forth...” He stared hard at the jewel for a long moment, then snapped his hand closed over it and turned back to his work.

Those smiles were rarer now. Findis remembered the first time she had heard a name given to the nameless rift in her family. The King her father, in converse with his firstborn, had spoken in passing of “your sister.”

“Half-sister,” her brother returned.

The term was shocking. It was not a combination of words that made sense. Fëanor was constantly experimenting with language, coining words, refining and discarding them as he saw fit, but this was different. This was frightening nonsense, like speaking of parched water or false truth. How could there be a fraction of a sister?

“It’s simple,” Fëanor said, and he was speaking to her, not to Finwë, answering the hurt in her eyes, not in his father’s. “You share one parent with me, not both. You are my sister as far as concerns my father, you are none as far as your mother.”

“Half-sister.” The new word was bitter in her ears as she heard her father repeat it.

“Propose some other term to name what she is to me, if this one is not to your taste.”

“A person is not a measure of grain, to be halved.” Her mother spoke firmly. “ _ Half-sister _ sounds wrong.”

“And sharing one parent but not both sounds right?”

But the word was adopted. How else to describe the children of Finwë’s house, as a half-brother was added to the half-sister, and a half-brother and half-sister again, halves and halves that somehow never added up to a whole? Findis watched as the rift in her family grew, driven wider as it was ignored, driven wider by every attempt to heal it, and she had no words for what that rift might be.

Few shared her reserve of judgement. Fëanor was a polarizing figure even in his youth, and his undeniable brilliance only made the effect more pronounced. It was not that he was unlikeable – indeed, even his detractors rather lamented that such compelling force of personality, such gifts of mind and person, should be wasted as he wasted them – but he did not care about being liked, and took no trouble at all to endear himself to those who look askance at him, and spoke their discontent to Indis’ children.

“There is a darkness in the needlewoman’s proud son,” they said. “Finwë has indulged him in too much.”

Findis thought of the cloth hung over the workshop windows, and the light in the jewel in his hand. Fëanor made far finer things now – he and his students caught light and bent it and sharpened it until it could cut like a blade or slip through the subtle weft of matter itself. They said that Aulë himself wondered at his works.

“No,” she said.

“What?”

“That is – not it.” She was already regretting having spoken. The words were not right. “If there is something amiss in Fëanáro, it is not that he has had too much of what he wants.”

 

She took no part in the disputes of her family. There was little good to be had in words; they caused only injury, even when they were not spoken with the intent to woun d. There had not been hate between them. There had not always been hate. Not one of them could see how badly they hurt the others. There were no words yet for the wrongs they did each other.

There had been a period of ease after Fëanor had left his father’s house – married, at the earliest possible moment, to a girl with strong hands and a keen heart. For a while they were both preoccupied with each other, with their work, and with their children. But as her next brother neared adulthood the sleeping wrongness stirred again.

_ Nolofinwë _ , her father had named him, as if to underline his status as a prince of the Noldor, and as a prince of the Noldor he served at Finwë’s side.  Fëanor could neither go nor stay in peace from Finwë’s courts. Away, the thought of his place filled by another ate at him. Present, words grew barbed and the wounds grew deeper.

It was the Water Festival, and Fëanor had returned to the court at Tirion to find his brother – full-grown, strongly built, very nearly his own image – at his father’s hand. Findis believed that there had been some joy, at first, when they had seen each other, but it vanished, rasped away by rough words. In language, at least, Fëanor had the mastery, and he displayed it without moderation or mercy, talking circles around everyone at the high table. Galled, perhaps, by Fingolfin’s less-subtle references to his position of trust in Finwë’s dealings, he laughed without smiling, and refilled his cup with water-of-the-North.

“Is that so indeed, half-brother? Of your courtesy, if not your wisdom, reflect a little before you lesson me on my father’s will. You may be buzzing about the courts at Tirion, but I am still a son of Finwë.”

“Half-son,” said Fingolfin coolly.

It was the first time in Findis’ life that she had ever seen Fëanor at a loss for words. His expressive face suddenly went still, as if he had at that instant been replaced by an image of himself, carved and painted and lifeless.

“I only name you as you are,” Fingolfin pressed on. “You have one parent but not the other. Propose some other term, if this one is not to your taste –”

Fëanor’s eyes moved at last, flickering over the faces of his family. Findis felt those eyes on her, seeing without understanding, as if he were looking at a word in an unknown script. Then he abruptly got up and left the hall.

 

It was not long after that Findis decided to go to the mountains.

The choice to withdraw from the world was not unknown in the Blessed Realm. Many of the Vanyar spent years, centuries, in their great mountain monasteries, seeking the inner light. Many of those schools named one of the Valar as their patron, others did not. Children of the Vanyar on their way to adulthood often served as disciples to the singing or the dancing monks in those holy orders. Her youngest brother Arafinwë had done so, after spending a year at Ingwë’s court on the slopes of Taniquetil.

Rarer were the hermits, the solitary sages, who made their homes in the wilderness, in mountains and forests. The vows they took to their discipline were as holy as those of marriage and like marriage they lasted as long as the world should endure. Findis made no promises yet, nor even spoke of promise. Her will alone she spoke: not for her the life of a princess of the Noldor, nor the bonds of family, nor even the communal life of the monasteries. She was for the wilderness and the empty places, the wordless cry of the wind among the rocks.

There was a ceremony; words of intention so ancient that the form of the language was hardly recognizable. She laid down the rights of her birth and took up the obligations of a holy wanderer. Though both of her parents wept at their parting, neither of them attempted to dissuade her.

Her older brother did not come to the ceremony. She had not expected him to. But as she walked alone out of the city, Fëanor met her by the gates of Tirion.

She braced for him to say something that would make things worse, waited for the sharp-edged words, the words that were not insults exactly, were certainly not lies, were perhaps not even meant to sting.  _ Indis’s daughter _ , perhaps.  _ Half-sister _ .  _ Vanya _ .

But they never came. Fëanor said no word to her. Instead, he studied her for a long moment: the face and hair that were the image of her mother’s, the light traveling robes, the small pack she carried. He reached out and took her hand in his and pressed something into her palm.

She looked at it: the milk-white gem she had seen him working on so many years ago. It was simple now, almost crude. She cupped it in her hand, and in the shadow she could see the light within it clearly.

Fëanor released her hand. He said nothing by way of farewell or apology or excuse, and the sudden gratitude for that set her ringing, as one bell sounds when another is struck.  In that resonant silence she left Tirion, and turned her face toward the West.

 

She walked lightward for a long time, gold and silver washing over her in turns as the great Trees waxed and waned. At the mingling of the lights and at midday she sang, long wordless tunes that blended with the songs of the birds in the trees and the sound of streams among the rocks. The rhythm of the world was slow and regular, like breath, or the heartbeat of someone who slept.

She passed through the Calacirya and began her ascent. Not Taniquetil, but one of its smaller siblings: dense forest of birch and pine giving way to high stone pinnacles. It was drier here on the lightward side of the mountains, but mists still rose from the valleys and clouds still wrapped the peaks.   

The mountain disappeared as she climbed: there was only the stone and the forest and the endlessly rising ground.  In the solitude, the words began to appear at last, the words for the unspeakable questions. Here, where there was no one that they could hurt, she spoke the words aloud.

“Miriel Serinde,” she said to the trees and the quiet creatures that watched her from the underbrush. Her mother’s voice, her mother’s accent. She had never before spoken the name of her father’s other wife; to do so would have been to take a side, and tear the wound a little farther open.

“My father loved his wife,” she said to the silence. “She died and refused the world; he refused to wait for her. If these things had not happened then I would not exist.”

The loremasters had discussed this case endlessly, debating the meaning of the presence of death in the Blessed Realm. The Valar themselves had discussed it too, it was said, in their unfathomable fashion. Clouds on the heights of Taniquetil, lights in the land of the Dead, rumbling in the mountains, strange flowers blossoming across the plains.  _ How has this evil entered into the lands of bliss? _

“Am I the evidence of the marring of the world?”

She looked at her hands, already dusty with long travel.

“I do not feel like evidence.” 

She began to laugh to herself, but the sound choked in her throat. Instead she settled back into the rhythm of her steps and the trouble of her thoughts.

“They say that we came marred into a marred world; that nothing is ever free of the taint of the Enemy. Like the darkness that waits behind our eyes, under the rocks, inside the body. Even within us, that shadow...”

A new thought, and a more comforting one. “Perhaps I am not evidence of the marring, but instead of the way that it is mended. That the One is good and all his works shall end in good...

“ _ Nothing is mended _ .” The cry surprised her as she uttered it; she heard something startle and scurry away through the underbrush.

“They said we were the healing of the wound, but I have seen the wound growing deeper. And we did nothing, I did nothing, but exist – ” The pain in her mother’s eyes, the fire in her brothers’, the whispers. 

_ The needlewoman’s proud son carries death within him.  _

_ This is the mightiest of the Noldor; surely such greatness is the gift of the One himself.  _

“It was a mystery even to the Valar.” It was a strange thought, that even the Lords of Song, by whom the world was uttered, should be seeking after the order in things. If even they could not discern it, what hope, what clear path was there, for those who came into the world as small and finite creatures?

_ The light behind the light,  _ her brother had said, holding out the jewel. She put her hand into her pocket and turned it between her fingers. There was a pressure behind her eyes, like tears that could not be shed.

“I am the shape of the world’s injury.”

 

She climbed and she spoke, all the unsaid words of her childhood pouring themselves out into the stillness. But the silence and the solitude were stronger than all of the words that she knew or could invent, and when at last, exhausted, she had yielded up the last of her questions, the mountain still rose before her.

It was a mountain again; she could see the lands below grown as small and dear as illustrations in a well-read book. The grey-barked pines grew sparser and more rugged, twisted into fantastic shapes like the trailing of an ink-brush across paper. The peaks towered ahead in dizzying pinnacles of rock and ice and cloud.

She passed the tree-line, passed into the snow. In these upper reaches, the light was thin. She found herself stopping more and more often – to rest, to drink, to search for water when the store in her bottle ran out. She began to lose the measurement of time.

She found herself, chilled so deeply the cold had begun to make itself felt as pain, curled in the shelter of a rock against the wind and she could not tell whether the attenuated light were silver or gold. Had she been asleep? She had not dreamed; she felt no stronger for it. Perhaps she had slipped into the emptiness of mind the mystics praised from their hermitages and their cells: the state of pure receptivity through which the light of truth might shine unclouded and undimmed

_ Well, that was easy, _ she thought,  _ I have found enlightenment, now what? _

She tried to laugh again, but her throat was stiff with the cold.

_ I could die here _ , she thought, and then  _ Could I? _

She had not eaten since she had left the tree-line. She had been living as wanderers live, on the strength of the holy light and of her own spirit. Some time ago, with hunger griping at her, she had caught a rock-rabbit, but it had screamed so that she had let it go. Still, hunger was an only an inconvenience, likewise thirst and cold; weakness could not kill.

Death and loss were tales from the Starlit Lands, mere legends of Middle-Earth.  _ This is the Blessed Realm, _ she thought, digging her cold fingers into the frozen scree. _ It could never harm me. _

She pulled herself to her feet again. Out from the shelter of the outcropping, the wind tore at her, making it hard to keep her footing. She moved onward slowly, no longer able to tell whether she was moving upward.

The slope grew steeper, the rock faces sheer.  _ I could fall from this height, and the birds would pick my bones.. _ .

Her thoughts rose as loud as the wind in her ears, and clearer to her eyes than the mountains around her. Why did they speak of a land without death? The Blessed Realm might be good, but it was not safe. It had never been safe. There was death in everything – in height, in depth, in water and in weariness. Death was within her, in the terrible delicacy of the union of spirit and body.

At once she found that she was not alone. It was as if a shadow had torn itself loose from behind a rock, as if the blackness that dwelt behind closed eyes had been given a form. The wind died as she approached; the mountains themselves seemed to do reverence. Casting a form around herself with the careless grace of a supernova, the figure was something like a woman, and something like a world. She was a shape formed from unfathomable emptiness, outlined by radiances that slipped in and out of the spectrum of comprehension.

Findis found that she had already sunk to her knees, without the words for the glory before her.

A ripple of laughter, like the wind from a pulsing star. “Not to me, child. I am only her handmaiden.” Then there were hands enfolding her hands, and Ilmarë raised her up. The cold was gone, the memory of cold was gone, there was neither direction nor time but only the first of the Maiar holding her hands in hers. 

“Ilmarë – should I exist?”

The question dropped into the endless space and it caught on nothing, Findis saw the words descending and descending until they were lost.

“I know,” she said softly. “That was not the right question. But I...”

She felt the touch of one midnight hand on her face, gently raising her chin so that she met the eyes of the handmaiden of the Lady of the Stars.

Darkness swallowed Findis’s vision, a night beyond the reach of imagination. Nothing she had ever pictured when she thought of  _ darkness _ came near to this. The light in which she had been born and lived was gone; sense and sight and sound and thought erased together. This was the unmarked time before memory, the silence into which the world was spoken. And in that darkness, it seemed to her that her eyes were opened and she saw the stars.

These were not the stars as she had known them all her life, faint images in the shining dome of the heavens. These were the stars as her father had seen them, as her people had seen them when they first awoke from their slumber in the thought of the One. They blazed across the sky in unfathomable order, their light falling upon her.  _ This, this is why we spoke. It was the light that called words forth from us.  _

Lips brushed her forehead. Ilmarë was gone.

The world had returned: height and depth, wind in her face and stone beneath her feet. She was shaking.  _ Beyond the light is darkness, and beyond the darkness light unfathomable. _

She turned, and began to descend again, warmth in her blood and strength in her limbs.

***

She built her small home on the slopes of the mountain, on a promontory just below the tree-line. The world unfurled beneath her. The Kindler’s stars, almost invisible, shone above: the light behind the light.

She never left the mountain again. But even her holy solitude was not absolute: pilgrims made the long and difficult ascent from time to time. Some brought gifts, some sought wisdom, some, she suspected, merely wished to see if it could be done. She welcomed them graciously, and for the most part wordlessly.

Her nephew, Fingolfin’s firstborn, had been a tumbling child when she had departed for the mountain. When a strong young man with a bold open face approached her hermitage, she felt for the first time the passage of the long years, and rushed to embrace him. Fingon was cheerful, devout, and never stopped talking. He had carried with him a number of things that he thought she might feel deprived of in her solitude: bolts of cloth, jewelry and metal tools, a harp. After he had done her honor and descended the mountain again, she re-strung the harp and hung it at the corner of the house for the wind to play.

Her half-brother’s son came to visit more often – a broadly-built young man with Orome’s mark on him. He came empty-handed, and spoke no more than she did. Though their pieties were different in nature, they understood each other very well, and her thoughts went with him whenever he descended the mountain to return to the words and the strife of the cities of the Noldor.

Her mother made the ascent only once, and that was after the world had ended, after she had lost her husband and children, and the fragile peace that she had tried in vain to build was broken past repair. Wordless she waited beside her, until the silence turned from bitterness to sustenance, and eventually Indis had kissed her daughter’s brow and returned to the world, still without speaking a word.

Though Findis came no more among her people, she did not need to see it happening to know that the unhealed wounds in her family were tearing open finally and wholly. But she saw when the great lights went out, and the unlight came seething like floodwaters up the slopes of the mountain, and it seemed as if all the world were drowning in darkness.

The cries of terror and loss and despair rang through the Blessed Realm, faint and distant. But Findis looked to the heavens and the stars were there, impossibly large, impossibly bright, untouched, as they had burned over Cuivienen.  _ Beyond the darkness, light unfathomable. _


End file.
